A user interface, in the industrial design field of human-machine interaction, is the “space” where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the machine to the user which aids the user in making operational decisions. Examples of this broad concept of user interfaces include the interactive aspects of computer operating systems, hand tools, heavy machinery operator controls, and process controls. The design considerations applicable when creating user interfaces are related to or involve such disciplines as ergonomics and psychology.
Accordingly a user interface is the system by which people (users) interact with a machine (device) and includes hardware (physical) and software (logical) components. User interfaces exist for a wide variety of systems, and provide a means of:                Input—allowing the users to manipulate a system; and        Output—allowing the system to indicate the effects of the users' manipulation.        
Generally, the goal of human-machine interaction engineering is to produce a user interface which makes it easy, efficient, and enjoyable to operate a machine in the way which produces the desired result. This generally means that the operator needs to provide minimal input to achieve the desired output, that the machine minimizes undesired outputs to the human, and that the inputs provided by the operator are intuitive and logical. With the increased use of microprocessor based systems and the relative decline in societal awareness of heavy machinery, the term user interface has taken on overtones of the graphical user interface for electronic devices and systems, whilst industrial control panels and machinery control design discussions more commonly refer to human-machine interfaces. Other common terms for user interface include human-computer interface (HCI) and man-machine interface (MMI).
User interfaces are considered by some authors to be a prime ingredient of Computer user satisfaction. This arises as the design of a user interface affects the amount of effort the user must expend to provide input for the system and to interpret the output of the system, and how much effort it takes to learn how to do this. Usability is the degree to which the design of a particular user interface takes into account the human psychology and physiology of the users, and makes the process of using the system effective, efficient and satisfying.
Usability is mainly a characteristic of the user interface, but is also associated with the functionalities of the product and the process to design it. It describes how well a product can be used for its intended purpose by its target users with efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction, also taking into account the requirements from its context of use. In computer science and human-computer interaction, the user interface (of a computer program and/or electronic device) refers to the graphical, textual and auditory information presented to the user, and the control sequences (such as keystrokes with a computer keyboard or touchpad, movements of a computer mouse or finger on a touchpad, and other selections with one or more interfaces to the computer program and/or electronic device that the user employs to control the program
Direct manipulation interfaces refers to a general class of user interfaces that allows users to manipulate objects presented to them, using actions that correspond at least loosely to the physical world. However, to date the prior art solutions are confusingly referred to as direct machine interfaces as the user directly selects a feature or an item through an action with a keyboard, touchpad or other input device. However, a point-and-click or touch operation by a user to select an item for movement does not correspond to the physical world where the user would normally pick the item through a pinching or gripping motion with their hand.
Currently the following types of user interface are the most common, graphical user interfaces (GUI) and web-based user interfaces (WUI, also known as web user interfaces). A GUI accepts user input via devices such as keyboard, mouse, and touchpad and provide articulated graphical input/output on the device's display. There are at least two different principles widely used in GUI design, object-oriented user interfaces (OOUIs) and application oriented interfaces (AOIs). Implementations may utilize one or more languages including, but not limited to, and be designed to operate with one or more operating systems, including but not limited to, Symbian, OpenIndiana, Haiku, Android, Windows, Mac OS, iOS, RISC OS, GNU/Linux, Tablet OS, and Blackberry OS as appropriate for portable electronic devices (PEDs) and for fixed electronic devices (FEDs).
A WUI accepts input and provide output by generating web pages which are transmitted via the Internet and viewed by the user using a web browser program. Implementations may utilize Java, AJAX, Adobe Flex, Microsoft .NET, or similar technologies to provide real-time control in a separate program, eliminating the need to refresh a traditional HTML based web browser. Administrative web interfaces for web-servers, servers and networked computers are often called control panels.
Originally user interfaces employed command line interfaces, where the user provided the input by typing a command string with the computer keyboard and the system provided output by printing text on the computer monitor. In many instances such interfaces are still used by programmers and system administrators, in engineering and scientific environments, and by technically advanced personal computer users. These were then augmented in the past with the introduction of controls (also known as widgets) including but not limited to windows, text boxes, buttons, hyperlinks, drop-down lists, tabs, and pop-up menu which may be augmented by Interaction elements are interface objects that represent the state of an ongoing operation or transformation, either as visual remainders of the user intent (such as the pointer), or as affordances showing places where the user may interact including, but not limited to, cursors, pointers and adjustment handles.
Today user interfaces have evolved to include:                Attentive user interfaces manage the user attention deciding when to interrupt the user, the kind of warnings, and the level of detail of the messages presented to the user.        Batch interfaces are non-interactive user interfaces, where the user specifies all the details of the batch job in advance to batch processing, and receives the output when all the processing is done.        Conversational Interface Agents attempt to personify the computer interface in the form of an animated person, robot, or other character and present interactions in a conversational form.        Crossing-based interfaces are graphical user interfaces in which the primary task consists in crossing boundaries instead of pointing.        Gesture interfaces are graphical user interfaces which accept input in a form of hand gestures, or mouse gestures sketched with a computer mouse or a stylus.        Intelligent user interfaces are human-machine interfaces that aim to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and naturalness of human-machine interaction by representing, reasoning, and acting on models of the user, domain, task, discourse, and media (e.g., graphics, natural language, gesture).        Motion tracking interfaces monitor the user's body motions and translate them into commands.        Multi-screen interfaces, which employ multiple displays to provide a more flexible interaction and is often employed in computer game interactions.        Non-command user interfaces, which observe the user to infer his/her needs and intentions, without requiring that he/she formulate explicit commands.        Object-oriented user interfaces (OOUI) are based on object-oriented programming metaphors, allowing users to manipulate simulated objects and their properties.        Reflexive user interfaces where the users control and redefine the entire system via the user interface alone, for instance to change its command verbs.        Tangible user interfaces, which place a greater emphasis on touch and physical environment or its element.        Task-Focused Interfaces are user interfaces which address the information overload problem of the desktop metaphor by making tasks, not files, the primary unit of interaction        Text user interfaces are user interfaces which output text, but accept other form of input in addition to or in place of typed command strings.        Voice user interfaces, which accept input and provide output by generating voice prompts. The user input is made by pressing keys or buttons, or responding verbally to the interface.        Natural-Language interfaces—Used for search engines and on webpages. User types in a question and waits for a response.        Zero-Input interfaces get inputs from a set of sensors instead of querying the user with input dialogs.        Zooming user interfaces are graphical user interfaces in which information objects are represented at different levels of scale and detail, and where the user can change the scale of the viewed area in order to show more detail.        
However, despite the evolution of these multiple types of user interface these all treat the environment of the user upon the portable or fixed electronic device as a stable environment and do not fundamentally adjust the user interface or other aspects of the environment including the features and applications available based upon the user as an individual but rather assume all users engage an application in the same manner.
A property of a good user interface is consistency and providing the user with a consistent set of expectations, and then meeting those expectations. Consistency can be bad if not used for a purpose and when it serves no benefit for the end user, though; like any other principle, consistency has its limits. Consistency is one quality traded off in user interface design as described by the cognitive dimensions framework. In some cases, a violation of consistency principles can provide sufficiently clear advantages that a wise and careful user interface designer may choose to violate consistency to achieve some other important goal.
There are generally three aspects identified as relevant to consistency. First, the controls for different features should be presented in a consistent manner so that users can find the controls easily. For example, users find it difficult to use software when some commands are available through menus, some through icons, some through right-clicks, some under a separate button at one corner of a screen, some grouped by function, some grouped by “common,” some grouped by “advanced.” A user looking for a command should have a consistent search strategy for finding it. The more search strategies a user has to use, the more frustrating the search will be. The more consistent the grouping, the easier the search. The principle of monotony of design in user interfaces states that ideally there should be only way to achieve a simple operation, to facilitate habituation to the interface.
Second, there is the principle of astonishment in that various features should work in similar ways and hence an interface should not in one embodiment or situation require the user to “select feature, then select function to apply” and then in other situations “select function, and then select feature to apply. Commands should work the same way in all contexts. Third, consistency counsels against user interface changes version-to-version. Change should be minimized, and forward-compatibility should be maintained which adjusts as devices and interfaces mature. Traditionally, less mature applications and hardware had fewer users who were entrenched in any status quo and older, more broadly used applications and hardware had to carefully hew to the status quo to avoid disruptive costs and user backlash. However, today a new application and/or hardware element which is successful within the consumer field will evolve from nothing to millions of users within a very short period of time. For example, the Apple iPad™ was released April 2010 and sold 3 million units within the first 80 days. In the eight months of 2010 these sales totaled 14.8 million and in late 2011 Apple was widely believed to be on track to sell 40 million devices that year.
The design of user interfaces widely exploit mental models, which are generally founded on difficult to quantify, obscure, or incomplete facts, flexible which is considerably variable in positive as well as in negative sense, act as an information filter which cause selective perception (i.e. perception of only selected parts of information) and in many instances are limited when compared with the complexities surrounding the world. For example, the recently released Samsung Galaxy™ smartphone uses facial recognition to unlock the smartphone for a single user but does not perform any additional functionality as all protection is lost by simply giving the unlocked smartphone to another user.
Mental models are a fundamental way to understand organizational learning and in many instances are based upon deeply held images of thinking and acting. Mental models are so basic to understanding of the world that people are hardly conscious of them and are generally expressed in a couple of basic forms including:                Polygons—where vertices sharing an edge represent related items;        Causal-loop diagrams—which display tendency and a direction of information connections and the resulting causality; and        Flow diagrams—which are used to express a dynamic system.        
Accordingly, a users whilst unaware of the mental models employed anticipate users interfaces, software, and hardware to behave in particular ways and going against entrenched mental models will result in users feeling one or more of confused, ignored, and dissatisfied. Today social media mean that these users can rapidly express their opinions to a wide audience and negatively impact the commercial success of the software and/or hardware.
With the widespread penetration of portable electronic devices to consumers today a smartphone must support intuitive interfaces, provide rapid switching between applications allowing a user to browse, text, view, play, comment, etc through direct email, web based email, simple message service (SMS), telephony, multimedia applications, downloaded and online gaming, social media services, streamed multimedia content, etc. At the same time these portable electronic devices include multiple wireless interfaces, including but not limited to IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15, IEEE 802.16, IEEE 802.20, UMTS, GSM 850, GSM 900, GSM 1800, GSM 1900, and GPRS as well as one or more of Near Field Communication (NFC) interfaces, accelerometers, global positioning systems (GPS), and compass so that the devices are location aware and third party applications utilizing this information are increasing such as Google's Latitude, Apple's Find My Friends, and Singles Around Me.
With their ubiquitous nature and perceived personalized character smartphones are increasingly being targeted for other aspects of an individuals life such as purchasing with MasterCard's PayPass program or Visa's payWave, banking with applications from institutions such as Bank of America, Chase, PayPal, Wells Fargo, Capital One, American Express, and insurance with applications from State Farm etc as well as medical, news, lifestyle, health and fitness, and education. Accordingly, portable electronic devices such as a cellular telephone, smartphone, personal digital assistant (PDA), portable computer, pager, portable multimedia player, portable gaming console, laptop computer, tablet computer, and an electronic reader contain confidential and sensitive information relating to the user.
It is therefore increasingly beneficial for these electronic devices to adapt the applications, information, user interface etc presented to a user based upon the identity of the user. But additionally it would be beneficial for these aspects to be adjusted based upon the context of the user's use of the electronic device. Such principles, however, also apply to non-portable electronic devices such as Internet enable televisions, gaming systems, and desktop computers.
Accordingly user interfaces and electronic devices according to embodiments of the invention beneficially provide biometric recognition, environmental context, and dynamic reconfiguration with changing context, intuitive interfaces, and micro-contexts.
Biometric Recognition—wherein the user interface (UI) configuration discretely or in combination with other context factors varies according to the identity of the recognized user. Such contextual user based UI configuration for example including selection of one of a plurality of UIs for presentation to the user, adaptation of UI/dashboard elements, and adaptation of applications accessible and their settings.
Electronic Environment Context—wherein the electronic environment to the electronic device provides contextual basis for the user activities so that UI, dashboard, applications, settings, etc may be varied in dependence upon this wireless/wired environment.
Dynamic Context Adjustment—wherein the configuration of UI, dashboard, applications, settings, etc adapts as the context changes either discretely or continuously based upon the environment of the user electronically, geographically, temporally and/or people.
Micro-Contexts—wherein macro-contexts such home, travel, and work for example are actually multiple contexts that result in more subtle adjustments to the UI, dashboard, applications, settings, etc.
Intuitive User Interface—wherein motions made by the user which are more intuitive such as pinching, picking, opening, closing etc. are made through predetermined motions on a touchscreen which more closely resemble those made by a user in the real world.
Other aspects and features of the present invention will become apparent to those ordinarily skilled in the art upon review of the following description of specific embodiments of the invention in conjunction with the accompanying figures.